Industry News

Google search ranking volatility is heated this week, but some of the tools are having issues tracking them. Google is sending out penalties, manual actions...

On Thursday, January 23rd, Google updated its search quality raters guidelines PDF document. The last time Google updated this document was for the March 2024 spam update changes, over ten months ago. This update seems to focus on on spam and adds some additional details.

Google announced a number of new Google Ads Performance'¬'­ Max'¬'­ features with the aim to provide advertisers with more control, transparency, and actionable insights within Performance Max campaigns, the company said. These include updates around more campaign control, enhanced Search reporting and guidance, and asset group improvements.

Google's John Mueller said that when it comes to disavowing links "it's in a spammer's best interest to encourage others to spend time on it." Why? Because Google has said there is little reason to disavow links, unless you have a manual action or know you did some bad linking.

Google Ads has made two updates around advertiser verification recently. One, in some countries, Google will no longer require certification for some advertisers. Second, Google has updated and reorganized the Google Ads Advertiser Verification documentation.21

Microsoft is testing a new local pack design and layout for Bing Search local pack results. Bing is placing these blue boxes, either below the map, to the right side, including different numbered variations.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google looks to have expanded its enforcement of its site reputation abuse policy to European regions this week. Google began enforcement in the US back in May but Google seems to have issued a ton of these manual actions (manual penalties) to European based sites.

Yahoo seems to be testing AI Chat within its search results. The chat feature loads on the right side for your query. You click on it and it loads an AI chat bot.

Google is still testing its offensive page annotation feature in the Google iOS app still, but the good news is that the opt out feature does indeed work. Yes, it takes about a month, but if you opt out, Google will stop showing page annotations on your web pages.